The speed of the backbone between Australia and the US can sometimes make you wonder if there are not just two guys on either end of a tin can phone screaming one one zero one zero endlessly to each other back and forth. So the news from Amazon today is a welcome upgrade to the global AWS infrastructure.

In a short blog post on the Amazon Web Services Blog today, Jeff Barr announced that Amazon is adding an edge location in Sydney, Australia. The location will initially only host CloudFront (CDN) and Route 53 (DNS) resources. However, those two services alone will help AWS customers based in Australia and serving content to their own Australian customers to improve their response times greatly.

Prior to this announcement, AWS customers who wanted to deliver content to Australian based customers were delivering it from offshore locations like the US and Singapore. Having CloudFront resources hosted “locally” in Sydney delivering all that static content (including streaming media) to Australian based consumers will result in a much more pleasurable end-user experience.

The Route 53 addition also means that those AWS customers who host their DNS data with AWS will now also experience quicker DNS response times which will also improve the end-user experience by lowering overall in-browser response times.

With the appointment of Joe Ziegler as the AWS Evangelist for Australia and New Zealand recently, and now this new edge location announcement, Australian based AWS customers should be feeling reassured in their AWS investments.

In an email to current customers today, Amazon announced that lower pricing will go into effect as of October 1st for their Route 53 DNS hosting service.

From the email:

We are excited to announce that effective October 1st we’re reducing prices for Amazon Route 53, Amazon Web Services’ reliable and scalable domain name service. Amazon Route 53 routes end users to your Internet applications by translating human readable names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Effective October 1st, we’re cutting the price for each hosted zone from $1 per month to $0.50 per month for the first 25 zones, and then $0.10 per month for additional zones.

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JavaOne 2012

CON8122 - Amazon Web Services for Java Developers

Abstract: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an ideal platform to develop on and to use for hosting enterprise Java applications. The zero up-front costs and virtually infinite scalability of resources enable Java EE developers to start small and be confident that their infrastructure will grow with their application. In addition, the nature of AWS and the services available help solve some of the problems Java developers often face in more-traditional environments. In this session, you will be introduced to AWS concepts, gain an understanding of how existing Java EE applications can be migrated to the AWS environment, what advantages there are in doing that, and how to architect a new Java EE application from the ground up to leverage the AWS environment for maximum benefit.